carried to a higher point what they learned from the older nations with
whom they now came in contact. Phoenicia supplied them with an alphabet,
and they began the writing of books. Egypt showed them her records, and,
improving on her idea, they became historians. So far as we know, the
earliest real "histories" were written in Greece; that is, the earliest
accounts of a whole people, an entire series of events, as opposed to
the merely individual statements on the Egyptian monuments, the
personal, boastful clamor of some king.
Before we reach this period of written history we know that the Greeks
had long been civilized. Their own legends scarce reach back farther
than the first founding of Athens,[13] which they place about B.C. 1500.
Yet recent excavations in Crete have revealed the remains of a
civilization which must have antedated that by several centuries.
[Footnote 13: See _Theseus Founds Athens_, page 45.]
But we grope in darkness! The most ancient Greek book that has come down
to us is the _Iliad_, with its tale of the great war against Troy.[14]
Critics will not permit us to call the _Iliad_ a history, because it was
not composed, or at least not written down, until some centuries after
the events of which it tells. Moreover, it poetizes its theme, doubtless
enlarges its pictures, brings gods and goddesses before our eyes,
instead of severely excluding everything except what the blind bard
perchance could personally vouch for.
[Footnote 14: See _Fall of Troy_, page 70.]
Still both the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ are good enough history for
most of us, in that they give a full, outline of Grecian life and
society as Homer knew it. We see the little, petty states, with their
chiefs all-powerful, and the people quite ignored. We see the heroes
driving to battle in their chariots, guarded by shield and helmet,
flourishing sword and spear. We learn what Ulysses did not know of
foreign lands.. We hear Achilles' famed lament amid the dead, and note
the vague glimmering idea of a future life, which the Greeks had caught
perhaps from the Egyptians, perhaps from the suggestive land of dreams.
With the year B.C. 776 we come in contact with a clear marked
chronology. The Greeks themselves reckoned from that date by means of
olympiads or intervals between the Olympic games. The story becomes
clear. The autocratic little city kings, governing almost as they
pleased, have everywhere been displaced by oligarchies. The few leading
nobles may name one of themselves to bear rule, but the real power lies
divided among the class. Then, with the growing prominence of the
Pythian games[15] we come upon a new stage of national development. The
various cities begin to form alliances, to recognize the fact that they
may be made safer and happier by a larger national life. The sense of
brotherhood begins to extend beyond the circle of personal acquaintance.
[Footnote 15: See _Pythian Games at Delphi_, page 181.]
This period was one of lawmaking, of experimenting. The traditions, the
simple customs of the old kingly days, were no longer sufficient for the
guidance of the larger cities, the more complicated circles of society,
which were growing up. It was no longer possible for a man who did not
like his tribe to abandon it and wander elsewhere with his family and
herds. The land was too fully peopled for that. The dissatisfied could
only endure and grumble and rebel. One system of law after another was
tried and thrown aside. The class on whom in practice a rule bore most
hard, would refuse longer assent to it. There were uprisings, tumults,
bloody frays.
Sparta, at this time the most prominent of the Greek cities, evolved a
code which made her in some ways the wonder of ancient days. The state
was made all-powerful; it took entire possession of the citizen, with
the purpose of making him a fighter, a strong defender of himself and of
his country. His home life was almost obliterated, or, if you like, the
whole city was made one huge family. All men ate in common; youth was
severely restrained; its training was all for physical hardihood. Modern
socialism, communism, have seldom ventured further in theory than the
Spartans went in practice. The result seems to have been the production
of a race possessed of tremendous bodily power and courage, but of
stunted intellectual growth. The great individual minds of Greece, the
thinkers, the creators, did not come from Sparta.
In Athens a different _régime_ was meanwhile developing Hellenes of
another type. A realization of how superior the Greeks were to earlier
races, of what vast strides man was making in intelligence and social
organization, can in no way be better gained than by comparing the law
code of the Babylonian Hammurabi with that of Solon in Athens.[16] A
period of perhaps sixteen hundred years separates the two, but the
difference in their mental power is wider still.
[Footnote 16: See _Solon's Legislation_, page 203, and _Compilation of
the Earliest Code_, page 14.]
While the Greeks were thus forging rapidly ahead, their ancient kindred,
the Latins, were also progressing, though at a rate less dazzling. The
true date of Rome's founding we do not know. Her own legends give B.C.
753.[17] But recent excavations on the Palatine hill show that it was
already fortified at a much earlier period. Rome, we believe, was
originally a frontier fortress erected by the Latins to protect them
from the attacks of the non-Aryan races among whom they had intruded.
This stronghold became ever more numerously peopled, until it grew into
an individual state separate from the other Latin cities.
[Footnote 17: See _The Foundation of Rome_, page 116.]
The Romans passed through the vicissitudes which we have already noted
in Greece as characteristic of the Aryan development. The early war
leader became an absolute king, his power tended to become hereditary,
but its abuse roused the more powerful citizens to rebellion, and the
kingdom vanished in an oligarchy.[18] This last change occurred in Rome
about B.C. 510, and it was attended by such disasters that the city sank
back into a condition that was almost barbarous when compared with her
opulence under the Tarquin kings.
[Footnote 18: See _Rome Established as a Republic_, page 300.]
It was soon after this that the Persians, ignorant of their own
decadence, and dreaming still of world power, resolved to conquer the
remaining little states lying scarce known along the boundaries of their
empire. They attacked the Greeks, and at Marathon (B.C. 490) and Salamis
(B.C. 480) were hurled back and their power broken.[19]
[Footnote 19: See _Battle of Marathon_, page 322, and _Invasion of
Greece_, page 354.]
This was a world event, one of the great turning points, a decision that
could not have been otherwise if man was really to progress. The
degenerate, enfeebled, half-Semitized Aryans of Asia were not permitted
to crush the higher type which was developing in Europe. The more
vigorous bodies and far abler brains of the Greeks enabled them to
triumph over all the hordes of their opponents. The few conquered the
many; and the following era became one of European progress, not of
Asiatic stagnation.
(FOR THE NEXT SECTION OF THIS GENERAL SURVEY SEE VOLUME II.)
DAWN OF CIVILIZATION
B.C. 5867[20]
G.C.C. MASPERO
It is a far cry to hark back to 11,000 years before Christ, yet
borings in the valley of the Nile, whence comes the first recorded
history of the human race, have unveiled to the light pottery and
other relics of civilization that, at the rate of deposits of the
Nile, must have taken at least that number of years to cover.
[Footnote 20: Champollion.]
Nature takes countless thousands of years to form and build up her
limestone hills, but buried deep in these we find evidences of a
stone age wherein man devised and made himself edged tools and
weapons of rudely chipped stone. These shaped, edged implements, we
have learned, were made by white-heating a suitable flint or stone
and tracing thereon with cold water the pattern desired, just as
practised by the Indians of the American continent, and in our day
by the manufacturers of ancient (_sic_) arrow-, spear-, and
axe-heads. This shows a civilization that has learned the method of
artificially producing fire, and its uses.
Egypt is the monumental land of the earth, as the Egyptians are the
monumental people of history. The first human monarch to reign over
all Egypt was Menes, the founder of Memphis. As the gate of Africa,
Egypt has always held an important position in world-politics. Its
ancient wealth and power were enormous. Inclusive of the Soudan,
its population is now more than eight millions. Its present
importance is indicated by its relations to England. Historians
vary in their compilations of Egyptian chronology. The epoch of
Menes is fixed by Bunsen at B.C. 3643, by Lepsius at B.C. 3892, and
by Poole at B.C. 2717. Before Menes Egypt was divided into
independent kingdoms. It has always been a country of mysteries,
with the mighty Nile, and its inundations, so little understood by
the ancients; its trackless desert; its camels and caravans; its
tombs and temples; its obelisks and pyramids, its groups of gods:
Ra, Osiris, Isis, Apis, Horus, Hathor--the very names breathe
suggestions of mystery, cruelty, pomp, and power. In the sciences
and in the industrial arts the ancient Egyptians were highly
cultivated. Much Egyptian literature has come down to us, but it is
unsystematic and entirely devoid of style, being without lofty
ideas or charms. In art, however, Egypt may be placed next to
Greece, particularly in architecture.
The age of the Pyramid-builders was a brilliant one. They prove the
magnificence of the kings and the vast amount of human labor at
their disposal. The regal power at that time was very strong. The
reign of Khufu or Cheops is marked by the building of the great
pyramid. The pyramids were the tombs of kings, built in the
necropolis of Memphis, ten miles above the modern Cairo. Security
was the object as well as splendor.
As remarked by a great Egyptologist, the whole life of the Egyptian
was spent in the contemplation of death; thus the tomb became the
concrete thought. The belief of the ancient Egyptian was that so
long as his body remained intact so was his immortality; whence
arose the embalming of the great, and hence the immense structures
of stone to secure the inviolability of the entombed monarch.
The monuments have as yet yielded no account of the events which tended
to unite Egypt under the rule of one man; we can only surmise that the
feudal principalities had gradually been drawn together into two groups,
each of which formed a separate kingdom. Heliopolis became the chief
focus in the north, from which civilization radiated over the wet plain
and the marshes of the Delta.
Its colleges of priests had collected, condensed, and arranged the
principal myths of the local regions; the Ennead to which it gave
conception would never have obtained the popularity which we must
acknowledge it had, if its princes had not exercised, for at least some
period, an actual suzerainty over the neighboring plains. It was around
Heliopolis that the kingdom of Lower Egypt was organized; everything
there bore traces of Heliopolitan theories--the protocol of the kings,
their supposed descent from Ra, and the enthusiastic worship which they
offered to the sun.
The Delta, owing to its compact and restricted area, was aptly suited
for government from one centre; the Nile valley proper, narrow,
tortuous, and stretching like a thin strip on either bank of the river,
did not lend itself to so complete a unity. It, too, represented a
single kingdom, having the reed and the lotus for its emblems; but its
component parts were more loosely united, its religion was less
systematized, and it lacked a well-placed city to serve as a political
and sacerdotal centre. Hermopolis contained schools of theologians who
certainly played an important part in the development of myths and
dogmas; but the influence of its rulers was never widely felt.
In the south, Siut disputed their supremacy, and Heracleopolis stopped
their road to the north. These three cities thwarted and neutralized one
another, and not one of them ever succeeded in obtaining a lasting
authority over Upper Egypt. Each of the two kingdoms had its own natural
advantages and its system of government, which gave to it a peculiar
character, and stamped it, as it were, with a distinct personality down
to its latest days. The kingdom of Upper Egypt was more powerful,
richer, better populated, and was governed apparently by more active and
enterprising rulers. It is to one of the latter, Mini or Menes of
Thinis, that tradition ascribes the honor of having fused the two Egypts
into a single empire, and of having inaugurated the reign of the human
dynasties.
Thinis figured in the historic period as one of the least of Egyptian
cities. It barely maintained an existence on the left bank of the Nile,
if not on the exact spot now occupied by Girgeh, at least only a short
distance from it. The principality of the Osirian Reliquary, of which it
was the metropolis, occupied the valley from one mountain to the other,
and gradually extended across the desert as far as the Great Theban
Oasis. Its inhabitants worshipped a sky-god, Anhuri, or rather two twin
gods, Anhuri-shu, who were speedily amalgamated with the solar deities
and became a warlike personification of Ra.
Anhuri-shu, like all other solar manifestations, came to be associated
with a goddess having the form or head of a lioness--a Sokhit, who took
for the occasion the epithet of Mihit, the northern one. Some of the
dead from this city are buried on the other side of the Nile, near the
modern village of Mesheikh, at the foot of the Arabian chain, whose deep
cliffs here approach somewhat near the river: the principal necropolis
was at some distance to the east, near the sacred town of Abydos. It
would appear that, at the outset, Abydos was the capital of the country,
for the entire nome bore the same name as the city, and had adopted for
its symbol the representation of the reliquary in which the god reposed.
In very early times Abydos fell into decay, and resigned its political
rank to Thinis, but its religious importance remained unimpaired. The
city occupied a long and narrow strip between the canal and the first
slopes of the Libyan mountains. A brick fortress defended it from the
incursions of the Bedouin, and beside it the temple of the god of the
dead reared its naked walls. Here Anhuri, having passed from life to
death, was worshipped under the name of Khontamentit, the chief of that
western region whither souls repair on quitting this earth.
It is impossible to say by what blending of doctrines or by what
political combinations this Sun of the Night came to be identified with
Osiris of Mendes, since the fusion dates back to a very remote
antiquity; it had become an established fact long before the most
ancient sacred books were compiled. Osiris Khontamentit grew rapidly in
popular favor, and his temple attracted annually an increasing number of
pilgrims. The Great Oasis had been considered at first as a sort of
mysterious paradise, whither the dead went in search of peace and
happiness. It was called Uit, the Sepulchre; this name clung to it after
it had become an actual Egyptian province, and the remembrance of its
ancient purpose survived in the minds of the people, so that the
"cleft," the gorge in the mountain through which the doubles journeyed
toward it, never ceased to be regarded as one of the gates of the other
world.
At the time of the New Year festivals, spirits flocked thither from all
parts of the valley; they there awaited the coming of the dying sun, in
order to embark with him and enter safely the dominions of Khontamentit.
Abydos, even before the historic period, was the only town, and its god
the only god, whose worship, practised by all Egyptians, inspired them
all with an equal devotion.
Did this sort of moral conquest give rise, later on, to a belief in a
material conquest by the princes of Thinis and Abydos, or is there an
historical foundation for the tradition which ascribes to them the
establishment of a single monarchy? It is the Thinite Menes, whom the
Theban annalists point out as the ancestor of the glorious Pharaohs of
the XVIII dynasty: it is he also who is inscribed in the Memphite
chronicles, followed by Manetho, at the head of their lists of human
kings, and all Egypt for centuries acknowledged him as its first mortal
ruler.
It is true that a chief of Thinis may well have borne such a name, and
may have accomplished feats which rendered him famous; but on closer
examination his pretensions to reality disappear, and his personality is
reduced to a cipher.
"This Menes, according to the priests, surrounded Memphis with dikes.
For the river formerly followed the sand-hills for some distance on the
Libyan side. Menes, having dammed up the reach about a hundred stadia to
the south of Memphis, caused the old bed to dry up, and conveyed the
river through an artificial channel dug midway between the two mountain
ranges.
"Then Menes, the first who was king, having enclosed a space of ground
with dikes, founded that town which is still called Memphis: he then
made a lake around it to the north and west, fed by the river; the city
he bounded on the east by the Nile." The history of Memphis, such as it
can be gathered from the monuments, differs considerably from the
tradition current in Egypt at the time of Herodotus.
It appears, indeed, that at the outset the site on which it subsequently
arose was occupied by a small fortress, Anbu-hazu--the white wall--which
was dependent on Heliopolis and in which Phtah possessed a sanctuary.
After the "white wall" was separated from the Heliopolitan principality
to form a nome by itself it assumed a certain importance, and furnished,
so it was said, the dynasties which succeeded the Thinite. Its
prosperity dates only, however, from the time when the sovereigns of the
V and VI dynasties fixed on it for their residence; one of them, Papi I,
there founded for himself and for his "double" after him, a new town,
which he called Minnofiru, from his tomb. Minnofiru, which is the
correct pronunciation and the origin of Memphis, probably signified "the
good refuge," the haven of the good, the burying-place where the blessed
dead came to rest beside Osiris.
The people soon forgot the true interpretation, or probably it did not
fall in with their taste for romantic tales. They rather despised, as a
rule, to discover in the beginnings of history individuals from whom the
countries or cities with which they were familiar took their names: if
no tradition supplied them with this, they did not experience any
scruples in inventing one. The Egyptians of the time of the Ptolemies,
who were guided in their philological speculations by the pronunciation
in vogue around them, attributed the patronship of their city to a
Princess Memphis, a daughter of its founder, the fabulous Uchoreus;
those of preceding ages before the name had become altered thought to
find in Minnofiru or "Mini Nofir," or "Menes the Good," the reputed
founder of the capital of the Delta. Menes the Good, divested of his
epithet, is none other than Menes, the first king of all Egypt, and he
owes his existence to a popular attempt at etymology.
The legend which identifies the establishment of the kingdom with the
construction of the city, must have originated at a time when Memphis
was still the residence of the kings and the seat of government, at
latest about the end of the Memphite period. It must have been an old
tradition at the time of the Theban dynasties, since they admitted
unhesitatingly the authenticity of the statements which ascribed to the
northern city so marked a superiority over their own country. When the
hero was once created and firmly established in his position, there was
little difficulty in inventing a story about him which would portray him
as a paragon and an ideal sovereign.
He was represented in turn as architect, warrior, and statesman; he had
founded Memphis, he had begun the temple of Phtah, written laws and
regulated the worship of the gods, particularly that of Hapis, and he
had conducted expeditions against the Libyans. When he lost his only son
in the flower of his age, the people improvised a hymn of mourning to
console him--the "Maneros"--both the words and the tune of which were
handed down from generation to generation.
He did not, moreover, disdain the luxuries of the table, for he invented
the art of serving a dinner, and the mode of eating it in a reclining
posture. One day, while hunting, his dogs, excited by something or
other, fell upon him to devour him. He escaped with difficulty and,
pursued by them, fled to the shore of Lake Moeris, and was there
brought to bay; he was on the point of succumbing to them, when a
crocodile took him on his back and carried him across to the other side.
In gratitude he built a new town, which he called Crocodilopolis, and
assigned to it for its god the crocodile which had saved him; he then
erected close to it the famous labyrinth and a pyramid for his tomb.
Other traditions show him in a less favorable light. They accuse him of
having, by horrible crimes, excited against him the anger of the gods,
and allege that after a reign of sixty-two years he was killed by a
hippopotamus which came forth from the Nile. They also relate that the
Saite Tafnakhti, returning from an expedition against the Arabs, during
which he had been obliged to renounce the pomp and luxuries of life, had
solemnly cursed him, and had caused his imprecations to be inscribed
upon a "stele"[21] set up in the temple of Amon at Thebes. Nevertheless,
in the memory that Egypt preserved of its first Pharaoh, the good
outweighed the evil. He was worshipped in Memphis, side by side with
Phtah and Ramses II.; his name figured at the head of the royal lists,
and his cult continued till the time of the Ptolemies.
[Footnote 21: The burned tile showing the impression of the stylus, made
on the clay while plastic.--ED.]
His immediate successors have only a semblance of reality, such as he
had. The lists give the order of succession, it is true, with the years
of their reigns almost to a day, sometimes the length of their lives,
but we may well ask whence the chroniclers procured so much precise
information. They were in the same position as ourselves with regard to
these ancient kings: they knew them by a tradition of a later age, by a
fragment papyrus fortuitously preserved in a temple, by accidentally
coming across some monument bearing their name, and were reduced, as it
were, to put together the few facts which they possessed, or to supply
such as were wanting by conjectures, often in a very improbable manner.
It is quite possible that they were unable to gather from the memory of
the past the names of those individuals of which they made up the first
two dynasties. The forms of these names are curt and rugged, and
indicative of a rude and savage state, harmonizing with the
semi-barbaric period to which they are relegated: Ati the Wrestler, Teti
the Runner, Qeunqoni the Crusher, are suitable rulers for a people the
first duty of whose chief was to lead his followers into battle, and to
strike harder than any other man in the thickest of the fight.